Plane Crashes - How Science Should Be
If you want one of the clearest demonstrations of collective intelligence ever created -and how corruption can impede progress in other areas of science - look at commercial aviation.
If you want one of the clearest demonstrations of collective intelligence ever created, look at commercial aviation.
As we often point out, collective intelligence can happen in real time - like a swarm solving a problem together. Or it can happen layered over time more slowly - like Einstein building his theories on top of Newton’s. Both are forms of collective intelligence operating at different rates of speed and fallibility.
Commercial aviation became one of the safest industries in history because it never got away from real science and because it maximized the potential for collective intelligence. It embraced radical error correction and optimized for independent replication of experiments. It created a global system in which failures are investigated, findings are broadly shared across all users - including competitors, procedures are updated, and everyone benefits from the lessons. Compared with many other fields, it has been exceptionally successful at turning individual failures into collective knowledge.
Over the past 50 years, commercial aviation has reduced its fatal crash rate by approximately 92%. Pilots did not become 40 times smarter. Humanity built a better system for learning.
Every major failure became an opportunity for the entire industry to learn. Investigations are public, not locked behind paywalls like science journals in other fields. Every airline benefits from lessons learned by every other airline, unlike many other industries, such as medical or energy innovation.
Reality - not authority - is the final judge.
Now compare that with much of modern scientific publishing.
Too often, scientific knowledge is filtered through centralized journals that decide what deserves attention, what gets funded, what gets published, and ultimately what is considered respectable. Prestige, impact factors, and citation counts can become proxies for truth. The scientific method was never supposed to depend on gatekeepers. It was supposed to depend on criticism, replication, and reality.
Commercial aviation largely succeeded because it built a system that rewards error correction rather than reputation. A hypothesis is valuable only if it survives contact with the real world. In airlines, feedback is immediate, objective, and impossible to negotiate with.
That is why aviation improved so dramatically. It did not treat publication as the finish line. It embraced transparency and built an ecosystem where mistakes are exposed, explanations are relentlessly tested, and successful ideas spread rapidly across the entire network through replication.
The lesson is clear: our advancement isn’t limited by individual intelligence. It is limited by the quality of the systems we build to discover and eliminate error, and solve problems creatively in groups. Wherever criticism is encouraged, evidence is transparent, replication is valued above prestige, feedback loops exist, and knowledge flows freely, collective intelligence flourishes. Wherever information is concentrated behind gatekeepers, criticism is discouraged, and incentives favor protecting institutions over correcting mistakes, progress slows and corruption takes hold.
The future belongs to societies that optimize for transparency over authority, replication over reputation, and systems over individuals.
Plus, look at how corrupt our science systems really are. Look courageously. Did you know Ghislaine Maxwell’s father, Robert Maxwell, was one of the architects of the modern scientific publishing industry, and the centralization of science? Why do you think that is?
Read more here:
Decentralize it all! Make it radically transparent!
Thanks for reading!
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and……… solving problems is happiness!” David Deutsch
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We fix the world. How? We build genies like this
A simple way to understand how we can learn from mistakes is to crack a simple cipher. When you succeed, secrets hidden are known. With certainty in each individual case.
And all that you need is pen and paper.
I appreciate your contrasting aviation with the conduct of science at the current time. It is eye opening.
The scientific method is actually the cryptanalytic method. The cryptanalytic method leads to definitive results in each individual case. It is able to do it by eliminating all errors in that particular case. To many, this is hard to believe. To find out for oneself, solve a simple cipher.